The present invention relates generally to software-defined networking, and more specifically, to a software-defined networking interface between multiple platform managers.
Cloud computing distributes processing across multiple computing resources in a network. Cloud computing typically provides on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, network bandwidth, servers, processing, memory, storage, applications, virtual machines, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released. The computing resources can include a variety of different computing platforms. Computing platforms include server-specific platform managers that locally control provisioning of computing and network resources. Each platform manager typically is customized for the particular hardware and software resources of the computing platform upon which it resides. Platform managers can define allocations for virtual machines, processing resources, memory, input/output flows, bandwidth requirements, and the like.
Platform managers for different computing platforms can include a number of similar functions but are not typically capable of being directly ported across computing platforms. Certain interfacing functions of the platform managers can conflict relative to other platform managers, making computing platform integration difficult particularly in a cloud computing environment.